Rants & Reviews

February 2013

26 February 2013

We saw your boobs, and your boobs, and your boobs, Seth McFarlane sang – his teeth so white and his privilege so resplendent – embracing among these opportunities to peek at the breasts of actresses scenes of violence and rape, such as Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry or Jody Foster in The Accused. I had spent a lot of time cutting up onions and peppers and apples and pickles for my potato salad – I had even ironed my cloth napkins, in preparation for the arrival of my Oscars posse, a group of less than a half dozen who have been watching the Academy Awards together for years and years. I didn’t vacuum the carpets and re-arrange the furniture in order to have some straight white male play out his problems in my living room.

If he wasn’t insulting me as a woman, he was toying with me as a Jew – suggesting (in his Ted character) that to qualify for Hollywood Mark Wahlberg should convert to Judaism and donate to Israel – or being singularly unfunny about race: conflating Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy. If he wasn’t insulting Adele’s size – Adele for gawd’s sake! – he was giggling with smarmy glee at the women he supposed enjoyed the flu because it caused them to lose some weight. He addressed the evening to the other straight white men – the only audience that counts for him, apparently. [The first Oscars, 1929]

I truly freaked when he referred to a “bum” pissing on the DVD of his own film. What the fuck is a “bum”? A homeless kid thrown out of his house by homophobic parents? an unemployed woman trying to support her child? an addict with no access to rehab? I haven’t heard the word “bum” for a long time and I don’t want it spat into my living room.

So this guy is a comedian? Why does he need to apologize and explain his “jokes?” Because they aren’t working. Because they aren’t funny. Because he’s an asshole and even he knows it. That’s why he so self-referential, commenting on his own routines, critiquing his own schtick as he fails to squeeze any joy from the room. McFarlane is the Academy’s idea of appealing to a "younger" audience, as if through bypassing the Boomers and the legacy of our movements, Hollywood can drag women right back to the 1950s. [31st Oscars 1959]

That Seth McFarlane was chosen for the job of MC, despite being so ill-suited and so idiotic, is just the tip of the iceberg. It goes back even beyond the fact that of the 175 nominees, just 35 were women. It’s not only who is making the choices about nominations and MCs: it’s about who is making the choices about who gets to make and be involved in the movies. But then, you knew that.

The highlight of the evening, besides hangin’ with my cadre of Oscars peeps eating my potato salad, was Shirley Bassey’s astounding performance (see a short clip below). At age 76 she reprised her 1964 version of the James Bond theme song “Goldfinger” with all the gusto and pizzazz needed to truly own the evening, musically. Daniel Day-Lewis, too, rose above the rest with his acceptance speech. Meryl Streep (the presenter of his Oscar for best acting) and he had done a “straight swap,” he claimed: he had been set to play Margaret Thatcher and she was Spielberg’s first choice to play Lincoln.

The best that McFarlane could muster was a less-than-grand finale with the chirpy, squeaky Kristin Chenoweth in a duet about the losers, naming names, that reinforced the sour repulsion he had earned throughout the evening. The producers defended his entire performance as “cutting edge and irreverent,” as if white boys hating women and people of color was the latest thing. Perhaps the best line in the reviews I’ve read of the evening comes from Margaret Lyons in her piece “Why Seth MacFarlane’s Misogyny Matters,” in which she said: “This wasn't an awards ceremony so much as a black-tie celebration of the straight white male gaze.”

23 February 2013

Periodically – probably about once per decade – I write this same article. It’s mostly addressed to my contemporaries, to Boomers. I say, Let’s not be old yet, not until we really are old. I work with seniors and elders and have done so on one level or another for much of my life. I know what old is and even though I receive Medicare, I know I haven’t got there yet.

For ten years I have been teaching fitness to people over 60 – most are in their 80s, and I’ve had a really good run. But this year my students have been dying in a wave of loss that washes away one fab person after another at a rate that has our heads spinning. I have been teaching these four weekly classes of 30 students each for a decade, plus some shorter courses of dance and fitness to other groups of seniors.

It was all cool when most of the students were in their 70s and early 80s, but that was 10 years ago. Now many are well into their 80s and their 90s. Things get complicated and difficult at those ages. Because that’s old.

When you are old, your world shrinks. You lose your best friends, your siblings, your partner, and the longer you live the more isolated you become. Your doctor retires, it’s hard to climb into your claw-foot bathtub, people around you are freaking out that you are still driving.

Those of us who are in our 60s are not in that situation, at least most of us aren’t. Many of us have friends who are fighting cancer or who have lost that fight. We know contemporaries who have had hip replacements, tooth implants, and steroid shots in arthritic shoulders. But we’re still traveling and driving and in many cases working and creating, and most of our datebooks are not utterly dominated by doctor and therapy appointments.

It seems so profoundly unfair that we don’t receive an end-date when we get our birth-date. If only I knew how much time I had left, I’d have answers to a lot of questions. When I turned 65, I freaked. I figure I have 20 years left. Now I need to weigh the question of when I can stop hustling in order to just sit down and write. Twenty years are not very many years, considering how many books I want to get together and get out there. How many countries I want to visit or revisit. How many friends thousands of miles away I long to see. How many sexual and cultural and international adventures are out there for me. How much injustice I need to resist.

We aren’t old yet and if we continue letting our mood and fears spiral downward, encouraging each other to identify as old, letting the passing years dominate our thoughts, allowing our invisibility in the world to determine our self-image, then we’re going to waste the time we do have left. It’s hard. I keep having epiphanies about all the unfulfilled goals I need to let go – from achieving financial security to learning trapeze skills. But I don’t want to drag along in a depressed state of self-censorship that limits what I can do with the time I have left. There’s plenty of time to be feeble and failing, but not yet. We’re 60s people – we’re world-changers and butt kickers. Let’s keep it up. I want to live.

20 February 2013

My friends Susan and Gilbert from Vermont
took a condo for January-February in Fernandina
Beach, a town in the NE corner of Florida on Amelia Island, right on the Georgia border.
I arrive on Valentine’s Day after a grueling flight that takes me in and out of
redundant time zones, the details of which experience are best left to decay.

Amelia
Island, named for the
daughter of George II, is only 13 by 4 miles. Fernandina
Beach, one of the two towns on the
Island, has a population of under 12,000 and is situated about 25 miles
northeast of Jacksonville,
where I flew into. Fernandina
Beach has a 50-block area
of Victorian homes and buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.

It’s famous for having been held by so many successive
colonial powers, and for its smuggling of slaves north despite the fact that
the slave trade had been abolished, during the period between the 1783 Treaty
of Paris that returned Amelia Island to Spain and 1821 when it became a part of
the USA.

Because both of my hosts are ridiculously good cooks, meals
are a major high during this visit. For dinner, Gilbert broils a delectable steak
and a perfected baked potato and Susan adds two magic salads. Their pampering
goes a long way to chill me out after months of successive deaths in the
fitness classes for elders that I have been teaching for a decade. We have had
a tsunami of dying, after a pretty good run over 10 years, but when people are
in their 80s or thereabout, 10 years makes a big difference. My life – our
lives – have been dominated by visits to hospice and funerals. Last weekend, I
had to brave the aftermath of the blizzard to drive an hour across town to
deliver a memorial for one of our youngest, strongest, most popular students
who, at a robust, handsome 75 got an unexpected diagnosis of cancer and failed
fast.

Feb 15

This morning I join my friends for the second half of their
walk on the beach and it is good to be here in February when one can feel quite
private. Susan points out the pelicans and Gilbert shows me the skimmers, a
black and white type of seagull with a longer, lower bill.

An historically Black beach here was known as American Beach, a 200-acre ocean-front community
established in the 1930s. Although it was a popular vacation spot for
African-Americans, too often barred from white-only beaches, by the 1970s
people had many more choices and it was no longer the only dance in town. There
remains a Black community on Amelia
Island.

Gilbert and I drive into town, both to visit the produce
stand, which features whatever the farmers bring in that day, and to tour the
town. Built around 1850, the wooden houses have gingerbread ornamental porches,
not unlike New Orleans.
It is one of the sweetest towns I have ever seen in the States, with a
decorative color palette and the landscaping of loving hands.

I snap a photo of Kate’s Tree. It’s a massive oak around
which city employees were forced to build a split road, instead of removing it,
when Kate Bailey defended it with her shotgun.

Did I mention the remarkable plethora of second hand and
consignment stores, organized by size and color, all
items spotless and clean?
We make the rounds, starting with Swamp, a combo art/antique store run by two
women, one of whom carves portrait mermaids from driftwood (see above). Thoroughly
remarkable. We continue our shopping – I pick up three items for $5 at the sale
at Buy Gones – until we’re peckish. Tasties is calling. It’s the super-popular
hamburger/fries/beer joint where a burger is $3.50 and fries are $2.

The evening back at the apartment is calm. Gil makes braised
pork, delicious fresh farm corn (in February!), and Susan’s salad. Susan, a
book maker and teacher of bookmaking, shows me the complicated, intricate,
meaningful book she has constructed for the Philadelphia International Festival
of
the Arts in 2013. The Athenaeum collaborated with the Philadelphia Center
for the Book to produce this exhibition and Susan’s multi-media work is a moving
expression of the exhibition’s theme "From Seneca Falls to Philadelphia:
Women of the Centennial."

This vacation is going to be filled with art. Both friends
agree to read the short stories in the collection I’m working on – giving me
valuable, informed feedback, and when they retire early, I follow soon after, taking
with me for reading the first chapters of a memoir that Gil is writing about
his harrowing, courageous youth.

Feb 16

I’m the first awake and I use the time to read. I’m
recognizing that despite my best intentions, this is going to be a vacation,
not a writing retreat. That’s okay because I have been needing to relax,
desperately, and what could be more therapeutic than hanging out with dear
friends and eating their fine food in this fab setting.

I’m always reluctant to go walking – I have a particular
strong laziness that way. I could dance salsa or swing or cha-cha all night
long; I teach fitness to at least four classes each week; winning an Olympic
medal for my trampoline expertise is at the top of my bucket list. But I’ll do
a lot to avoid mounting a single flight of steps or walking two blocks.

However, today we go to Egan’s Creek Greenway, a public park
with a path along huge marshes (Susan calls them “the lungs of the sea”) at
high tide, and I walk for two miles. The white egrets are huge and graceful.
The blue heron (left) standing so close to the path is not fazed as I photograph
him/her. The ospreys soar super-high. And I’m with friends who know one from
the other. We don’t go down the path where they ran into an alligator last
year, but Gil teaches me that I should approach one boldly, pet its head with
one hand while kicking directly at the teeth. Right.

I’m most mesmerized by the Spanish moss, something I have
always found magically ethereal the few times I’ve been near it. Tomorrow
they’ll take me to the part of the park where the moss is even more prominent.

Lunch is a lamb barley soup Susan has somehow whipped up
with a plate of cheeses and baguette, and as always a gorgeous salad. This
comfort food soothes me as I work on one of the newsletters I produce as part
of my professional portfolio. As it were.

We go out to dinner, primped up in the couture we got at the
3-for-$5 sale at Buy Gones, looking smokin’. Susan and Gil have already been to
Espana a few times and so we are greeted as regulars. Susan has her fave: Spicy
Snapper; and Gil and I split a meat paella and a chicken dish with lemon and
garlic. We come home for dessert and they retire at 9:30. I am reading a how-to
book on self-publishing on my Kindle, which you would think would put me right
to sleep, but I find my slumber sketchy at best.

February 17, 2013

It is only 30 degrees, but Susan, always the bravest, goes
for a very long beach
walk nonetheless. Gilbert and I head back to the Greenway, but enter from the
opposite end where he promises me (and delivers) many trees dripping with
Spanish moss, a plant that literally lives on air, or rather on rainfall. It is
too cold for the turtles to be out or even the alligators apparently, but the
birds – egrets and huge storks among them – put on a dazzling show, whether
they are fishing for breakfast, lifting off for a flight, or hanging out with
their buddies.

The afternoon is lazy – I nod out as I persevere with my self-publishing
book – although we stop to nibble the raisin oat cookies Susan makes, in
between her preparations for an eggplant curry for dinner. Tonight is a big
night: we’re going to put the TV on for the first time and Susan and Gil (he,
only reluctantly) and I are going to stay up to watch the Xmas special episode
(ie, in the UK)
of Downton Abbey, a kind of add-on to season 3. While dinner exceeds all
expectations, the show is an absolute dud with the main character Mary being a
shit to her single sister and then on to the predictable death of Mary’s
husband Matthew, shortly after the birth of their newborn– predictable only because
we see him speeding along in a convertible singing and smiling, his white-boy
hair blowing in the wind as a truck approaches. The actor playing this
character wanted out of the show so this quick exit was provided. Julian Fellowes,
the creator, is flirting with NBC over a new series “The Gilded Age,” and
clearly has tired of Downton.

February 18, 2013

Good grief. I wake up to 29 degrees. Thanks, Florida. And then I hear
from Boston
friends who are digging out from 5” of snow and my thanks become sincere. It’s
time to launder the sheets and clean the bathroom and pack my suitcases and
face departure later today.

First we visit the local historical museum, which traces
back to the days when Amelia
Island was inhabited by
the matrilineal and matrilocal Timucua Indians, whose ancestors first came here
in 11,000 B.C.! European disease, warfare, slave trading, and hard labor all
contributed to the demise of the Timucua, I learn from the museum exhibition,
and the last known Timucua left with the Spanish for Cuba in 1764.

I learn too about a Jewish man named David Levy Yulee who
was the first US Senator
from Florida
and the first Jewish Senator. He was also a Confederate who was convicted of
treason and served 10 months in prison. The museum itself was the former county
jail, and we are shown evidence of the racist distinctions in the accommodation
of early prisoners.

We have a last quiet hour at home, reading and writing,
before we set out to the airport. As always, I can’t help but note that my
greatest skill is vacationing and I can’t understand why no one has paid me
professionally to do it full-time.

Except for the archival painting image, I took all photos with my iPhone.